6 Ways to Grow your Facebook Group

Transcript:
We’re having a chuckle here, because I’m in the room with 3 very good friends. We’re just done a little bit of a brainstorm. We’re talking about how to grow Facebook Groups, which is a very niche thing. Facebook Groups are a big thing now. I think our Facebook Groups are our 4th or our 5th biggest lead source, which is quite big considering our companies often doing £15 million a year plus sometimes. So, some of these are going to be a little bit hacky. So, you take and use what you feel you should use. I’ll start with the non-hacky ones.

1. Pitch to join the group

So, the first thing is on your own profile and your own page, I would say once every 10 days, put a little compelling pitch to join the group. So, often people will go, join my group. Well, no one wants to join a group, because we’re all in a million groups. I’d love to join a group, if I can buy a product for £5 and sell it for 20. I’d love to join a group, if there’s an inner circle of online sellers, who are all helping each other make a few grand a month. So, the key when you post on your profile, if you have a page, is, to give them a little bit of a reason, a little small pitch to join the group.

2. Link from your email

The next thing you can do, is, you can start an article, and write the first few lines and say, hey, the rest of the article is in my online seller’s group. That’s number 1. Number 2, is, you can email your contacts, and in it you have and say, hey, I’ve got an online seller’s community. It’s a community. It’s not anywhere, where we sell things. But if you’re interested in online selling, you know that’s what I’m focussed on now. You can join it for free. So, it’s the second thing you can do. Now, I’m telling you this, assuming you’re not an internet marketer. There are many things you can do, if you’re an internet marketer. The third thing, is, put a link at the bottom of your email, and make sure that’s also on your mobile, because you’re naturally get a few then.

3. Run a competition

The next thing you can do, is, you can run a competition. So, I’ve run competitions or incentives, where for example, let’s say, I wanted to grow my LinkedIn profile. I was getting 200 a day people pretty much from Facebook onto LinkedIn, because I was giving them bonuses, or gifts, or reason to come ad follow me on LinkedIn. So, let’s say, I might give them a free copy of my Money book. If I didn’t feel like I could afford to give free copies of books, if I thought I was going to get a lot, I might give them a pdf version of my actual book, Money, or some kind of valuable bonus. You might give a list of, Steve, all the stores, the way you can get products cheap all the times, that they do the sales, and that kind of stuff.

Sometimes, people assume free things have to be reports, but they can be spreadsheets. I give you another example, I mean, if you can give a list of all the Facebook groups, where you could go in, and sell, and offer your services, that would be quite a valuable thing, because there isn’t million Facebook Groups. But, if you’re a property investor, you could get a list of the best 20 property groups, or the best recruitment groups, or whatever.

So, be creative about what you give away. I can imagine, if you’re an arbitrage, here are the 22 days a year, where you usually get all the cheap products that you can then sell at a higher price. Then book them a year in advance in your diary. Because it’s funny. Things like, Black Friday always catch me out. Ah, shit, it’s Black Friday next week. You want to be like, thinking about that months before. So, that might be a valuable bonus, for example. So, that’s the third thing, I think that you can do.

4. Join other Facebook groups

There are quite a few Facebook Groups, where their rules are very relaxed. There are quite a few Facebook Groups, where you can’t breathe without being banned. So, whatever your niche is, you want to go on to Facebook, and search that niche. For example, my group is called, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. So, I’m entrepreneur business owner. So, if I search business in the Facebook bar, which is essentially, a search engine, it’ll bring up posts, groups, people, et cetera related to business. Hit the tab, which says groups, and it will give you all the business groups. And then I’ll go, join, join, join, join, join. I won’t join really small ones. But just initially, you join them all. Then I’ll search what else? Entrepreneur, and then there will be entrepreneur group. Disruptive entrepreneur will come up. There are a few others. Hit the groups tab so that you just get the groups, and not just all the posts. What other words might you have for business, entrepreneur? It might be ecommerce, leverage. Try and think of words. Put business and entrepreneur into the thesaurus and find related words. Because not all groups are about business are called business. There’s a good one called, 4N Networking, that’s got 25,000 members. Now, you wouldn’t be able to find that on the search. So, you find the related ones.

Now, one of these days, what I’m going to do, is, I’m going to compile a list of all these groups. I’m going to have them as a bonus, because it’s really valuable. They do change over time. Then what you do, is, you go in them all. Because it is annoying when you’re a member of 100 groups, and you know that 15 of them are worth your time, and the rest aren’t. So, then what you do, is, you go in them all. Now, you look at some of them, and you think, ah, well, there are no posts. So, you immediately exit. You’ve got another one. You think, it’s a spam fest. Exit. You go in another one, and there are lots of posts, but there are no comments. You exit. Then you see a few, and you think, wow, there are loads of posts. It’s got 100 comments on that post, and you stay. Then on each one, you read the group rules.

Now, some of them you can only really do content marketing, i.e., you can only give value, which is still good. If you do good content marketing, people will come, and follow you, join you, et cetera. I think content marketing is great as we’ve talked about earlier. But there will others, where there are no real rules. In one of them, because you know, look, there are no rules. There are no rules. So, one of them I went, I don’t know, if you’re into entrepreneurship, but, if you are, just tag yourself in, and I can add you into the entrepreneurs’ group. It’s got 350 members. It’s the entrepreneurs’ group. I’m still in that one group. That’s fine, because there are no rules.

I would check the rules first, because I think that’s some people just go into groups, and just immediately break the rules. I probably done that in the past. I’d been a bit disruptive. But now, I’d always try and follow the rules of the group, because I think that’s good etiquette. But I can think at the top of my head a few, I’ll give you them, Steve, where you can literally go in, and go, hey, I don’t know, if you’re into ecommerce, but this group is for ecommerce members. You can get quite a few. So, that’s the 4th thing you can do to grow your group.

5. Run Facebook Ads

If you are prepared to invest a little bit more money, you can run Facebook Ads to grow your group. Now, there’s upsides and downsides o this, and I want to warn you. Don’t go spending loads of money. But I think everyone should be running Facebook Ads, even if you don’t think you want to run a Facebook Ads. Here’s why. As you grow your business, you may want to, or need to run Facebook Ads. So, surely, it’s best now to spend 5 quid a day, or 30 quid a week, and just start testing them. Playing with them. See how they go. Test the different ad copy. Test when you get them to join the group, there’s no landing page copy. Because then, if you’ve been doing that for a few months, when you want to actually do a bit of a bigger launch, you think I could spend a grand on Facebook Ads or more. We spent 130 grand a month on Facebook Ads now. I think we should be doing more testing.

But I think sometimes, when you can spend money, you’re lazy. So, don’t see that as a good thing necessarily. We’re less guerrilla when we’ve got more money in the bank. But you’ll get to a point, where you get your click revenue down, from say, £1 a click to 80, to 50, to maybe, 30, to 20 pence a click. Look, if you could buy a group member for a quid, you’d buy 50 every week, and see how it goes. I would. If I could buy a member for a quid, I’d buy like, 10,000 right now. I’d probably buy 100,000 right now. So, that’s another thing you can do.

But obviously, you’ve got to think about time. If you want to be doing Facebook Ads, I’ve got a team who do my Ads. You’ve got to think about if you leverage that out, or if you get someone else to do it.

6. Email marketing

The next thing, is, you can send emails to other people. Well, they send emails for you. But other people will send emails on your behalf to join your Facebook group. That could also be to who’d listen to your podcast. That could be to email to your database. Now, the pay route, which is known in the industry as CPA. So, you could go to a list of broker, you could go to them, and say, hey, look, I’m looking for people who are in ecommerce who want a second income. You might be able to pay £1,000 for them to send an email on your behalf to 50,000 contacts. It’s a little bit harder with GDPR, but there’s still quite a few people that do it. Or, you could go to someone and say, hey, if you post about my ecommerce group, when it’s your turn to launch, I’ll post about your property company, and do a little reciprocal or JV.

Have you got a podcast yet? No? So, if you do have a podcast, you can obviously mention on your podcast that you’ve got a Facebook group. I probably say of the 330 episodes I’ve done on The Disruptive Entrepreneur, I reckon one in every 15 maybe, 20. I’ll say hey, look, come and join The Disruptive Entrepreneur Community. I won’t just say, come and join the Facebook Group. But I’ll say, hey, look, there’s where 12,000 of the podcast listeners are engaging, and debating, and discussing, helping each other, where you can get questions answered by me, which obviously, you can’t on the podcast. So, I reckon that’s a good start. That’s probably, a Part 2 somewhere on that.